About: Abinash Tripathy is credited with building the best web-2.0 team in India (for Zimbra which sold to Yahoo! for US$350million.)

This is a weird case self appreciation. From the blog post it is clear that Zoho built a good team and developed young college grads from not-so-famous colleges into star programmers by providing them training and opportunity. All this guy was to dole out cash and lure that team. Anyway, Zimbra is such a third class and loss making business that now Y! is trying to desperately sell it for a huge loss:
http://kara.allthingsd.com/20100104/exclusive-vmware-likely-to-buy-zimbra-from-yahoo/

He says “if candidate has worked in {ibm|infosys|tcs|satyam|patni……….any services firm in India} then move to Trash” and is very demeaning of IIT grads.

Clearly the hangover of not clearing JEE long long ago is still hurting. Who knows even the bitterness of not clearing the infosys interview is also playing into this. Silicon Valley has so many small exciting company, still this guy worked for the biggest company – Oracle where job is stable and life is good. Wait, did he failed the selection process of start-ups?

He also does not like Google India exclusively hiring IITians. So in his opinion Google India must be stupid. Oh yeah, all Google folks were despo to hire his coders.

In all seriousness, as a person who has used both gmail and Zimbra will not use Zimbra.

A humble request to PuneTech: Please do some deep analysis on people and ideas that you promote here and apply some filters when they claim they build THE BEST whatever wherever.

He says “if candidate has worked in {ibm|infosys|tcs|satyam|patni……….any services firm in India} then move to Trash”

I work for a services firm & so I was really interested to know the type of work Abinash did in Zimbra. See from his own words on where his Indian engineers were working & where Abinash himself focused in Zimbra. He focused on migration which is not as cool as he claims. By building a team which focused on migration, deployment & support services for Zimbra, he has no right to criticize the other Indian engineers working in Infosys or TCS or Satyam. He can market that to his engineers but he has no right to criticize others who created this industry in India.

From what I read, I agree that he built Zimbra India from scratch but you have also mentioned that his team has built the product which is not correct based on the below mention in the white paper. My understanding is that Zimbra India was formed after the product was built, matured & deployed. So the initial versions of the product were not built in India.

Zimbra is actually not as innovative idea as Abinash claims. He compares it with Twitter, Facebook & Google but Zimbra is just a old wine in a new bottle. If the same is said for Hotmail in 1997, it was true. Bhatia really invented that. Web mail was one of the most innovative idea that time. But in Zimbra case, the team which worked in Openwave just moved to create another Mail platform. So it’s not as innovative as he claims.

In my view, it’s Yahoo’s desperateness which made them pay $350 million for Zimbra which did way below $20 million in revenue ( Again Abinash only posted this figure in one of his blog ). I prefer to claim success if Yahoo make their ROI. So far Zimbra haven’t contributed for huge growth for Yahoo.

Infosys has created more than 1,00,000 jobs in India & have made more millionaires than Zimbra. They also have a strong banking solution which is being deployed in many global banks. Without Infosys, TCS, Wipro, we wouldn’t have the IT industry in India & I am sure Zimbra would not have started its operation for migration & support services in India. It would have either kept it in some low cost location in US or moved to China or somewhere.

I really appreciate your intention in motivating young start-ups with lot of success stories like this. But unfortunately after reading Abinash blogs, I was not convinced to take inspiration from him. Still my hero in Indian IT is N.R. Narayana Murthy.

Here is the white paper link which mentions Abinash responsibility

http://files.zimbra.com/website/docs/Zimbra%20Migration%20Whitepaper.pdf

Abinash Tripathy, General Manager, India: 6 years in Openwave technical product management, 2 years at Software.com, 3 years at Oracle. Abinash has experience managing multi-million-user migrations, and has been building our India team for a variety of migration, deployment, customization, and support services.

http://randommusingsofabinash.blogspot.com/2009/06/should-you-fund-your-product-startup-by.html

From the above blog post, it is clear that Zimbra made well below $20 million in revenue when Yahoo paid them $350 million.

Navin has summarized all my thoughts as well.

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